Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village Read online

  The dilemma is not being ignored. Both the Government and the National Farmers’ Union recognize it. The latter has accepted a levy of £6 a year per member to create a fund for setting up a re-training scheme. As the output for each worker is reckoned to be worth £2,000 a year to the farmer, even if it only goes up by one per cent it will increase the man’s worth by £20 annually, which is more than three times the levy. But the National Union of Agricultural Workers view this and many other “farm attraction” ideas put forward by both Government and employers alike as irrelevant to the real issue—wages.

  The wage (1967) for an often highly experienced man in charge of complicated and valuable machines, and livestock, is £11 11s. for a forty-four-hour week. Average overtime brings this up to between £12 and £14 12s. for fifty hours. This, placed against industry’s average wage of £20 6s. for forty-four hours makes agriculture the largest concentration of low-paid skilled workers in Britain. The N.U.A.W.’s claim for a basic £14 for a forty-hour week is unlikely to be settled for a long time to come. And behind the present injustice, and menacing the prosperous scene—woven into the very fabric of the farming pattern, in fact—is the grim old tradition of labour without money. A few shillings up until 1940 and the fewest pounds since. Although wages in kind, of course. This is instantly pointed out whenever the subject is raised. But when these traditional perks were assessed in 1967 it was found that they were worth 7s. 3d. a week, which was almost the exact amount which the bushel of malt, etc., given by the Victorian farmer to his man after the harvest, was worth. Before the war, farmer and worker shared the slump and were plunged into common hardships—“There worn’t no money about,” and that was that. But since 1956 farm profits have increased forty-three per cent—by £113 million in eleven years—and evidence of this new wealth can be seen in every village. Old farmhouses are beautifully restored and made luxurious with fitted carpets and oil-fired central heating, deep-freezes for game and fruit, and new furniture. Rovers and Jaguars fill the garages, also the son’s new sports car. This prosperity is more wondered at than resented by the worker who, if he is middle-aged, might remark, “When I went to work along o’ him afore the war, he hadn’t got two ha’pennies to rub together.” What has happened in the purely social sense is that the financial position of the ordinary “working” farmer and that of the two or three men he employs has become as extreme as that which existed between landowner and labourer before 1914. Little of this utterly transformed scene can be obtained by the ordinary village man. The farm doesn’t offer him a “career,” with the word’s sense of advancement and real rewards, it offers him a mid-twentieth-century version of the old hireling position. With land at over £300 an acre, it is useless to dream of a place of his own. With the social structure of English village life proving to be more or less impervious to real change and constantly attracting a retired element which clings to all the old attitudes as to a lifebelt, he will never have the same sense of freedom as a worker in one of the new towns. It is all this, an inescapable status quo maintained by a poor wage and the social pressures exerted by a small community, which decide the bright boys against farm work. The work itself has never been despised and those that leave it know that they will never find anything else which is so entirely satisfying.

  183,200 of England and Wales’s farms employ no workers at all; they are cultivated entirely by the farmer and his family. 24,600 employ only part-time help. And of the 116,000 which employ whole-time workers, over ninety per cent employ less than five. With the methods of culture having undergone complicated technological changes which involve heavy fertilizer and machine bills, nearly all the young workers are bound to have lives of swiftly increasing responsibility. But those village men most needed to cope with the second agricultural revolution are the very ones likely to reject farming altogether, not because they hate it or because it doesn’t have a natural draw for them, but because, where they are concerned, its ideas are primitive or moribund.

  The N.U.A.W. acknowledges the threat “from the increased difficulties experienced in maintaining a high level of recruitment from an ever-reducing pool of agricultural workers. . . .” The Union has 3,406 branches, 361 less than ten years ago. Suffolk, one of the centres of its founding struggles, has 160 branches. Sales of its magazine Land Worker are declining and giving anxiety, and the Agricultural Apprenticeship Council, on which the Union is represented and in which it places great hopes for the future, shows a poor response.

  The N.U.A.W. arbitrated, nearly always with success, for some forty of its Suffolk members during the past year. The chief claims, as always, concerned the tied-cottage (twenty cases in Suffolk in 1966). The tied-cottage provides both farmers and their employees with their most emotional grouse, evoking all the traditional melodrama of the wicked squire and the rustic tenant being pushed out into the storm, and requires some kind of final solution. All the prejudices, myths and indignations of the past rise up when a man changes his job but can’t leave the house which went with his old job because of the shortage of accommodation. The farmer can’t get a new man because the near-free—approximately 6s. a week—cottage is the carrot which makes him accept his low wage and local politicians are quick to pounce on any trouble created by the situation to add fuel to the class war. No less than 413 tied-cottage cases were tried in 1966, an increase of 203 over 1964, although only one farmer dared to take the law into his own hands by evicting a tenant. He was heavily fined. Although the legal position for both worker and employer is now as fair as reasonableness and the law can make it, the tied-cottage idea is one of the chief dislikes of the young farm-worker who wants to keep himself free from farmer-paternalism. It belongs to the wages “in kind” system and the intelligent countryman would prefer £14–15 a week as a straight return for his work—no house, firewood, milk, potatoes or the odd gallon of petrol.

  Union membership is far from 100 per cent but there has been a considerable East Anglian upsurge of interest in its policies during the last five years. It was in these clay-land villages that the first effective agricultural trade unions were formed during the late nineteenth century to fight the wage cuts brought about by the great farming slump. Wages in Suffolk—10s. 6d. a week—were then the lowest in England. They crept up to 36s. 6d. in 1919 and back to 25s. in 1924. In 1938 they were 34s. and in 1947 £4 10s. It wasn’t until the end of the 1950s that the great disparity with the rest of industry began to show itself and reminded people that, as a previous secretary of the Suffolk N.U.A.W. wrote,

  despite all that has been done, the farm-workers remain a class isolated and apart. Low paid, living in many cases in tied-cottages which made the worker dependent on his employer not only for his livelihood, but also for his home, his children often getting scrimped schooling and with local life and local justice still largely in the hands of the farmers and the landowners, it was small wonder that the young men went away at the first chance . . .

  The following was written sixty years ago by a Wickham Market farmer to Sir Henry Rider Haggard, who was making an inventory of England’s then wrecked rural scene.

  The labourers “back to the land.” That is the cry of the press and the fancy of the people. Well, I do not think that they will ever come back; certainly no legislation will ever bring them. Some of the rising generation may be induced to stay, but it will be by training them to the use of machinery and paying them higher wages. It should be remembered that the most intelligent men have gone: these will never come back, but the rising generation may stay as competition in the town increases, and the young men of the country are better paid. It should be remembered too that as many men as formerly are not required to till the land. During the last three years by the use of the self-binder I have seen five men gather in the harvest on this farm instead of seven. Other labour-saving machinery will be introduced. Uniformity of wages should also be discontinued, and the best men must be best paid: this will help them become farmers themselves better than any other means .
. . the fashion of the present day is the worship of money, and from this the labourer is no more exempt than the townsman. . . . It is not a question of rent or labour, or the farm, it is the man and, let me add, his wife.

  Change “self-binder” for combine harvester and “labourer” for worker and the letter is uncannily similar to The Times first leader of 5 January 1967.

  In modernizing and mechanizing their businesses, British farmers have easily led Europe. They have, in the past twenty years, gone on producing more and more food with fewer and fewer men. Now they are beginning to ask how much further the process can go without something breaking down. . . . The planners have assumed that they can afford to part with about 12,000 men a year to industry, but over the past five years the rate for the United Kingdom seems to have been about 20,000 a year and there is no sign that the drain from the land is slackening.

  Recession or not, factory buses still stream out into the countryside from the cities to collect new workers and it is all too often the energetic and the ambitious who are the first to take advantage of them. They do it even if it means changing a job which is skilled and interesting for one that is mechanical and unrewarding in all except cash.

  It is becoming harder to recruit likely youngsters for the farms . . . and harder still to keep them. Investment in new machines may fill the gap for some operations, but there are many jobs on the farm to which the machine provides no real answer. Better buildings and better management may enable one man to milk more cows or look after more meat animals, but each move of this kind puts a greater premium on his skill . . .

  Clearly, the main reason for the exodus is the disparity between the agricultural and industrial wage rates, which has markedly widened in the past few years. . . . New skills have been developed but, like some of the old ones, they have not yet been fully recompensed in terms of status as well as cash. The recently constituted training board may do something to change this and dispel old suspicions, though these die hard.

  The trend that has set in will not be quickly reversed. . . . It is not only the boys themselves who need to be convinced that there is a sound future in farming but their parents and their teachers as well. Unless they are, we may have the paradoxical situation . . . of an undermanned agriculture losing its workers permanently to industries which find themselves periodically overmanned . . .

  George Kirkland · aged forty-five · farm-worker and Secretary of the Akenfield branch of the National Union of Agricultural Workers

  I went from school to work as a shepherd boy on this farm and the only time I have been away from it was during the war. It is one of the big farms—about 700 acres—and mostly arable, although we’ve got everything, two herds of cows, grassland, sugar-beet, potatoes, rye, barley, wheat, oats, fruit—just everything.

  As regards to money, when I first started work I got 10s. a week for seven days a week. It was 8s. for the ordinary week’s work and about half a crown more for Saturdays and Sundays. If you were a man you got 5s. extra for Saturdays and Sundays.

  In those days, son followed father. That was the usual thing. So all of us boys followed father. Nearly all the village boys did this. We just had to watch and carry on. One or two broke away but it didn’t seem a natural thing to do. People didn’t need to ask a lad what he wanted to do when he grew up if they knew what his father did. You hear that farming was unpopular then, but it wasn’t deep down. We began watching at an early age; that was our training. I watched the shepherd and did what he did. He didn’t have to speak very often, which was just as well as he was a man who liked to keep words to himself. They used to call him Old Silence.

  We had 250 ewes and when they all lambed we had something like a 500 flock all told. Shepherding was a very boring job for a boy. You just sat around and watched the sheep. It was most boring and after about two years with the shepherd I was allowed to go along with the farm’s rough carpenter and help him fence, thatch, gate-hang, and make hurdles. We were actually thatching when the war broke out. The aerodrome was near and I was young. I could see all the village boys going off and the R.A.F. boys in their blue, and I thought, “If they are all going to the war, so am I.” The farmer tried to stop me. This was actually in 1938, the crisis year, so I didn’t join up until 1940 in the end. I went up to Euston House in London but I hadn’t the education for air-crew. Also I was in a reserved occupation and they said, “You must go back to your work, it is just as useful as flying.” But I wasn’t going to have that. “I am going to fight,” I said. And I did. I was in the Air Force for five and a half years, and that was the only time in my entire life that I was off this farm.

  My father used to say that farm-working was bad pay but a good life. In those days there wasn’t all that much difference between the farm-worker and the bricklayer or any other kind of workman. Since then there has been a great drift between the wages in what they now call the agricultural industry and every other industry. Last year (1966) we lost five per cent of our farm labour in Suffolk alone. The National Plan estimated a loss of only two and a half per cent. It is the bad money which makes men leave the land; they are quite proud enough of their jobs. The tied-cottage is another thing. The Labour Government said that they were going to do this and do that about the tied-cottage but so far they have done nothing, or very little, and things are still difficult. The tied-cottage isn’t such a problem in Suffolk as it is in Cambridgeshire and the Isle of Ely, where things are very bad. The agricultural worker, just as soon as he becomes redundant or leaves his job at a particular farm, is given two months’ notice to quit his house. Even the new law doesn’t help him much and he’s lucky if he can stay on for three months. Who can find a new house in three months? Our journal, the Land Worker, publishes a list of every tied-cottage case which comes before the courts. They are listed under the various counties and they give the name of the farmers involved. We publish up to fifty tied-cottage court cases each month, so you can see what a disgraceful problem it is.

  We are not 100 per cent members of the Agricultural Workers’ Union in the village—I wish we were. The trouble is that television and that sort of thing is keeping men away from the meetings. We get a head-office speaker, we send out information, or we might just have somebody giving a good talk on agriculture generally—anything you like—but hardly anyone comes. We don’t get the people like we used to. I’ve been in the Union for twenty-three years and there were some great meetings twenty years ago. But they’ve all dwindled away. There are thirty-odd members in the Akenfield branch but I bet if you called a meeting tomorrow you’d be lucky if you saw six. We are out for a £14-forty-hour week. This is our policy at the moment. It is very important. But when we had our annual County Conference no more than half the branches were represented. It was terrible. A lot of farm-workers don’t take any interest in politics at all.

  If there is any political talk, it is usually at breakfast time. The whole crowd of us is in the workshop having breakfast and perhaps some political thing has happened, and then we talk. Of course, I think nearly all agricultural workers are with the Labour Party and that is that. We are mostly Socialists vote-wise, and that’s about all. My father was a Liberal. Most of the old men are Liberals. He’s often told me that if his employer had known that he voted Liberal years ago he would have got the sack. It could be because of stories like this that the young men are so secretive. Why, they’ll tell you more about their sex than about their politics. Politics makes them very shy.

  Things were bad in my father’s day. He’s still alive, so you can’t say it was so very long ago. The farmers owned us then—or thought they did. Father said there would be dreadful dos if the farmer found out that his men were going to a political meeting or a liberal talk. This was in the 1920s. Father was in the trenches during the First War but since then he has hardly left the village. He may have gone to Norfolk occasionally but mostly he’s stayed put. He was classed as a head-labourer, a timekeeper, and after the gamekeeper John Daniel died, fat
her put in for his job. He could do this because, as well as being head-labourer, he was the keeper’s handyman. If the keeper was after poachers by night he always called on father to help him. There were between fourteen and fifteen keepers on this estate then which took up all the land between the rivers. In my father’s day a poacher was nearly always just a farm labourer who simply had to go out and get a bird or rabbit for the family dinner then—back! This kind of poacher was a job to catch, which was just as well, I thought. I once told my father about this. “Father,” I said, “if you take into account what the good book says, that every beast on this earth is for the good of mankind, why should Colonel Hawtry have the bloody lot?” My father couldn’t see this. He was brought up in the old ways and the game laws were the holiest laws where he was concerned.

  My mother died in 1945. She was like all the old folk, she did everything in strict rotation. That is how they all thought and lived. It was always washing on a Monday and baking on a Wednesday. It could be raining cats and dogs on a Monday but she’d still wash—sheets, flannel shirts and all. Like as not, Tuesday would be hot and she would have burnt half the coal up Monday night getting it all dry. I’ve heard her say time and time again, “If I get out of my routine I’m finished!” She had seven children and she had to work—there was no doubt about it. Doing great old piles of knitting and darning half into the night she reckoned was her “rest.”